Pope John XXIII

1 Pages 348 Words

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli
or
Pope John XXIII

Was born in 1881, the third of thirteen children in a peasant family in Sotto il Monte, near Bergamo. yet due to his intelligence he was able to get out .He was sponsored for an education at the Bergamo seminary, which carried out a severe religious training. When Roncalli was ordained, in 1904, the Church was fearful and inward looking. In 1871, with the loss of the Papal States to the modern nation of Italy and the restriction of Vatican sovereignty to its current borders, Pope Pius IX was very concerned and in this state of mind, he had forbidden Italy's Catholics from taking any part in national politics. Roncalli's first assignment as a priest was as secretary to the new Bishop of Bergamo, Giacomo Radini-Tedeschi. Bishop Radini-Tedeschi was a reformer who sought to re-involve the Church in the world. In August of 1915 it was discovered that Radini-Tedeschi had cancer. Pope Pius XII died on October 9, 1958, and the conclave began two weeks later. Roncalli was elected on the twelfth ballot, taking the name John XXIII. It was rumored that the top choice was really Giovanni Battista Montini; but he was considered unelectable because he was not yet a cardinal . Many believed that John had been elected as a papa di passagio, a transitional pope. He was seventy-seven years old. The first session of the Council dealt with liturgical reform and voted to allow Mass to be said in the vernacular; and proposed a reactionary, divisive schema defining the sources of revelation. When the schema was rejected by slightly less than the needed two-thirds majority of the bishops, John intervened personally to order a new commission to redraft it. By the end of the first session, he was dying of stomach cancer. On November 27, 1961, he suffered a massive intestinal hemorrhage. The Vatican press office issued a report that he had a bad cold; rumors flew around Rome that he was already dead and that ...